HOW TO STOP ROBO CALLS

Have you been inundated with telemarketers, robo calls, and scammers on your home telephone line?

Use this free service to eliminate annoying calls.

We’ve all been there. You’re just sitting down to dinner or your favorite Netflix binge and the phone begins ringing. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably gotten used to screening a lot of calls because so many are robocalls. You know the kind and you know the drill: Political ads, solicitations, scams. You pick up saying “Hello? Hello?” and then comes that eerie pause which tells you you’re about to hear a pre-recorded message.

It’s a rude waste of your attention, and yet many of us can’t just get rid of our home phone line. While you can ignore the call, often they call multiple times a day or every day of the week at the same time. The problem is widespread.

In early 2013 the FTC held a contest to combat the scourge of robocalls. The winner of that contest was Nomorobo, a free service which can check incoming calls to your phone lines against a massive blacklist database of known robocall sources. If Nomorobo detects a robocall, it screens the call much like the way internet web forms use CAPTCHA graphics to make sure you’re human. If the caller is a bot, the call never makes it to your phone. (Nomorobo will ring your phone once to let you know a call has been blocked.) Bingo! Peace and focus are preserved.

The service is free, but your phone provider must be able to provide a feature known as “Simultaneous Calling.” The Nomorobo website provides a form which quickly allows you to determine if your carrier already provides this service. If not, you can request it be added.

You can learn more about Nomorobo here:

http://www.nomorobo.com/

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